Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Storage requirements are growing exponentially and, as a result, companies are looking for alternatives to traditional tape-based solutions. The cloud can provide a cost-effective storage alternative, but it may not be the right solution for every case. Today, Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider, released a list of the top pros and cons to a cloud-based storage solution to help CIOs and other IT professionals determine if this cost-effective alternative to tape will work for their specific requirements.

“Most organizations can take advantage of cloud storage,” says Victor Dermott, solution architect, cloud computing, for Logicalis. Large organizations, Dermott notes, frequently have very large volumes of online storage and may have legal requirements to retain data for years, including unstructured data like pictures, films and radiology studies, resulting in petabytes of storage which can run into prohibitive costs for media and physical storage. Small and medium-sized organizations may benefit from the cloud’s affordable monthly terms and the ability to easily increase their storage service levels. “Any organization that has large volumes of archive data, or unstructured data, and a requirement to control and access that data on a policy basis can benefit from cloud-based storage systems,” Dermott says, noting that, frequently, the best data to store in the cloud are those types that have traditionally been stored on tape. To help IT pros determine if their companies can benefit from cloud storage, Dermott suggests a careful examination of the pros and cons…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Migrating applications is not a trivial process. Whether you want to move apps from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud or distribute them across multiple cloud providers, you’ll face obstacles. Moving virtual machines, migrating data and configuring networks can all create friction in the app migration process.

Migrating data from one cloud platform to another can be a substantial challenge.

Moving virtual machines. You have several options when migrating virtual machines (VMs) between an on-premises infrastructure and the cloud: using a shared machine image format, importing or rebuilding…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Egnyte netted $16 million in Series C funding to help raise its profile globally and to position itself as a leading hybrid cloud storage provider. The new cash brings its total funding to $32 million. Google Ventures, a new backer, led the round which also included funding from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Polaris Ventures. Google Ventures partner Karim Faris will join Egnyte’s board.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is one of many cloud storage players, including Box, LogMeIn, OwnCloud, trying to crack the enterprise market for cloud storage.

CEO Vineet Jain said he will use the money to make Egnyte more of a household — er boardroom — name. “There’s been a huge amount of marketing dollars spent by our friends at Box. The number one problem I need to address is that our awareness is still low compared to Box,” Jain told me in an interview…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Aryaka, a startup offering cloud-based wide area network optimization has raised $25 million in Series C funding. The round was led by InterWest Partners, with participation from Presidio Ventures, a Sumitomo Corporation Company and included existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures. It brings Aryaka’s total funding to $54 million.

Making wide area networks — the connections between multiple corporate offices or data centers — faster isn’t sexy, but it’s an important element of corporate computing, especially as we move to the cloud and more remote work forces. By taking the traditional WAN optimization game and moving it from boxes located inside corporate offices and data centers into a service comprised of a mesh network of connections, Aryaka has fundamentally changed the business…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Violin Memory, Inc., provider of one of the world’s fastest and most scalable flash Memory Arrays, served as the storage platform required by Cisco to set the 2-socket server world record in cloud computing performance as measured by the VMware VMmark 2.1 benchmark. A record of this magnitude validates the sustained performance achieved by Violin Memory Arrays and their ability to provide the infrastructure necessary to support virtualized and cloud environments.

VMmark 2.1: The Industry’s Virtualization Platform Benchmark VMmark 2.1 is the industry’s first multi-server datacenter virtualization benchmark, which assesses the performance of a group of virtualized real world applications. It includes a variety of common platform-level workloads such as live migration of virtual machines, cloning and deploying of virtual machines, and automatic virtual machine load balancing across the datacenter. To achieve the best results, end-to-end performance from server to storage is needed…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Elizabeth White.

Coraid on Tuesday unveiled the new Coraid ZX-Series family of NAS servers. Designed for cloud, video and Big Data customers, this high-performance unified storage solution is powered by the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system combined with Coraid’s EtherDrive technology to enable unmatched scalability, performance and operational simplicity.

Carl Wright, executive vice president at Coraid noted that "organizations are increasingly challenged to provide predictable, cost-effective file performance in the face of uncontrolled data growth. By extending our product family to include a best-in-class NAS offering, Coraid can meet that challenge with a unified storage solution that takes full advantage of the scalability and performance of Ethernet SAN."…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

Morphlabs , a provider of dynamic infrastructure services for the enterprise, has launched the mCloud Helix, a new converged private cloud infrastructures for enterprise IT consumers.

The mCloud Helix, a compact, scalable and efficient form of private cloud infrastructure, is powered by the open-source OpenStack cloud computing platform, and combines high performance solid-state-drive-powered (SSD-powered) nodes and preintegrated ZFS to eliminate the need for expensive enterprise SANs, the company said.

Morphlabs introduced mCloud Helix at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) July 17, also known as OpenStack Day at the event. The Morphlabs’ solution combines one of the smallest footprints of any cloud infrastructure on the market with unmatched density to set a new energy standard for watt/virtual CPU (vCPU). The Morphlabs’ mCloud Helix is built and tested on Dell PowerEdge C servers, which use the latest hyperscale technology for performance and efficiency. In addition, CoreSite, a national provider of network-rich data centers, has worked with Morphlabs to optimize its infrastructure for enterprises seeking to deploy their own mCloud Helix…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Most enterprise IT organizations focus more on technology than on thinking — a sad tendency I’ve often pointed out. Thus, I was happy to see InfoQ’s Mark Little review an article by Steve Jones of CapGemini. Both see the same lack of thought in how enterprises use technology. In fact, it’s worse than not thinking — there’s an active dislike of deeper consideration that gets expressed as ignoring or even disparaging planning, architecture, and design in IT.

This sorry state is quite evident as cloud computing begins to take hold in the standard IT technology arsenal. The fact of the matter is that there are two worlds. One involves the hype and good feelings about next-gen IT, such as cloud computing, that tells us the technology itself will save us from the mistakes of the past. Then there’s the world of planning, architecture, and design that makes the technology actually useful — despite IT’s aversion to this crucial stage…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Paul Korzeniowski.

When evaluating cloud services, enterprises first must determine whether to use an open source cloud platform or a proprietary one — an increasingly difficult decision.

As cloud services began to emerge, vendors such as Amazon, Google and Verizon/Terremark developed services based on proprietary APIs. These vendors provide only select interfaces to their software, making it difficult for enterprises to tailor cloud environments specific to their needs.

On the contrary, open source cloud software allows IT teams to modify the cloud architecture more than a proprietary or commercial cloud platform might. And working with the open source community often has benefits. “By adopting an open source model, vendors that may have small teams of developers gain more [programmers],” said Lydia Leong, research vice president at Gartner Inc…

Grazed from VoiceAndData. Author: Andrew Collins.

Vendors claim cloud storage offers a range of benefits to organisations, including cost savings and increased flexibility. But with things like security breaches, data sovereignty and the US Patriot Act breeding doubt in customers’ minds, the future of cloud storage is not certain.

“The cloud” has become one of the most used (perhaps overused) terms in IT discussions today. Vendors and service providers love to explain how the various forms of cloud computing can free your workers from the chains of their desktops, free up the time of your IT staff, and allow you to move your IT spending from CAPEX to OPEX.

Public cloud storage tools – remote storage, usually accessed via the internet, paid for in an on-demand fashion – have been available for some years now. Broadly speaking, they all offer remote data storage, are (usually) accessed via the internet and are paid for in an on-demand fashion…